NGOs

Back from holiday and in about an hour, I’ve just skimmed 250 pieces from the last three weeks of writing from my 15 favourite writers and bloggers, everyone from Paul Krugman and Martin Wolf to Texas in Africa and Political Climate.

One of the perks of writing a blog is that I can scrounge review copies of development-related books. I’m sure they’re all fascinating and I really want to read them but alas, they don’t come with extra hours in the day attached. So I now have a growing pile by my desk that is in danger of becoming a health hazard (pet cat crushed under falling tomes etc). In post holiday clear-out mode, I am therefore going to assuage my guilt by giving them all a plug after a cursory skim.

Google Analytics is dangerously addictive. You can see who’s visiting your blog, country by country, city by city and in real time. I have to ration myself or I’d be checking it every 5 minutes. Anyway, it turns out that I have now been writing this blog for two years. So here’s the verdict so far:
Number of posts: 445
Number of comments: 1322
Number of spam deleted (penis enlargement, viagra ads etc – let me know if you want me to let them through for your general amusement): 102, 069 (roughly 80 for every genuine comment, how depressing)

I took part in a conference on fragile states last week. Because it was held under Chatham House rules, I can’t say much about it, (except for the excellent on-the-record presentation by Tom Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which I blogged on at the time), but it got me thinking about a wider issue. Do we need a new model for conducting research that can be absorbed by aid workers?

You know you’ve had an impact when the Economist devotes three pages to your campaign, so hats off to Greenpeace and the other organizations featured in this week’s spread on palm oil. Here are some excerpts:

Gave a short presentation to the Westminster Food and Nutrition Forum last week on the thorny topic of food security, innovation and safety. The speakers and audience were mainly on the science/policy interface, (a very different epistemic community from last week’s EU aid gabfest, but the powerpoints were just as bad).

Wisdom of crowds time. We’re doing some thinking on renewable energy and energy poverty (which affects about 1.5-2bn people), and thought we’d pick your brains. My colleague John Magrath has written this guest blog as an opener, and I’ll run a few posts on energy-related issues over the next few days. Over to John:
As an NGO we’ve never done much work in the field. But increasingly, we’re deploying renewables because they make financial sense for

One  of the many strands of discussion at a Ditchley Foundation conference on climate change last week was the vexed question of how public opinion shapes the political space open to leaders on climate. There were many furrowed brows on this, not least given that the polling numbers on climate change are all heading the wrong way, all over the world – perhaps unsurprisingly, given the combination of the recession and media coverage of ‘climategate’.

It’s Friday, and in the interests of accountability, transparency, yadda yadda yadda it’s time to announce the winners of two previous competitions, and launch a third.
First up, the winner of the photocaption competition is quite clearly Matt (see pic). But thanks also for “I never pictured Hugo Chavez and John Cleese hooking up” (Soren). Van, I have no idea what “Needs more cowbell” means….